Barker Bites Back

A look at some newsy stuff and interesting bits as well as those hopefully amusing byways of technology.

Colin Barker

Colin has been a computer journalist for some 30 years having started in the business the same year that the IBM PC was launched, although the first piece he wrote was about computer audit. He was at one time editor of Computing magazine in London and prior to that held a number of editing jobs, including time spent at the late DEC Computing and was also the London editor for Byte magazine. Colin is pleased to report that apart from ZDNet at least two other sites/magazines he has worked for are still in business.
Colin did also live for five years in Boston, Mass.,and as a result became a dedicated Red Sox fan.

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Fujitsu Siemens has launched a BladeEngine for its PRIMERGY Blade Servers that offers virtualisation features along with unified network communications and a combined 10 Gbit Ethernet and iSCSI SAN Mezzanine card, according to the company.Designed for use in data centres, the card has a dual capability with its 10 Gbit Ethernet and iSCSI SAN controller for virtualised operations so that an individual machine can operate in, say, VMware and Xen environments.

Microsoft have billed today’s triple UK launch of Windows Server 2008 along with SQL Server and Visual Studio at the Wellcome Centre in central London. Microsoft is demanding the full attention of a lot of journalists (possible as many as 60 all told) to outline the new products.

If there was a reason why HP should fly a bunch of journalists off to Cannes in France it was revealed on Monday when the two companies joined up for a press conference to announce the latest step in their pact, that HP would be carrying VMware’s ESX 3i virtualisation product.The two companies have had a joint agreement for some time (“six or seven years” was one HP insider’s estimate) and this agreement broadens it significantly.

COPAN Systems the MAID storage supplier (MAID stands for Massive Arrays of Idle Disks) is partnering with Luminex Channel Gateway with the aim of Luminex making the most of COPAN’s clever storage.Luminex Software develops mainframe connectivity and virtual tape products and is hoping to take advantage of some of the features of MAID.

Small applause to HP for its use of re-cycled plastics as it has claimed something of a breakthrough. Instead of using pristine, new plastic in its print cartridges it has been using re-cycled plastic instead.

Bill Gates has often courted controversy in the past but these days he avoids it whenever possible. But, wherever he goes in the world, it is likely that relics of his misspent youth, making as much money for his company as he reasonably or unreasonably can, will continue to haunt him.

Tele Atlas is not a particularly large company working in a somewhat specialist field, but its upcoming sale has prompted a bidding war. A leader in the in-car navigation field, TomTom, has come in with a bid to buy the company believed to be around $2.

And so to Frankfurt and Storage Networking World 2007 by way a visiting HP and so the week starts. The storage industry is enjoying a boom currently thanks to the requirement for IT managers to keep everything.

There is some rivalry between these two systems giant, which was apparent this week.The fun started last week when HP invited the press to a meeting about a new system targeted at SMEs to take place last Wednesday.

XenSource/Citrix deal could upset the open source community, according to a Gartner analyst. Writing in Computerworld, analyst George Weiss said that the XenSource chief Peter Levine has "to make a concerted effort in order to retain the loyalty of the open-source Xen developers".

If there was a prize for a piece of research that throws up a blindingly obvious conclusion, that could be won by the latest research from Vanson Bourne, produced for the web hosting specialists, Hostway. One of the key nuggets is that 94 percent of IT managers "invest in more storage than they need".